THE BRUCE FRANKLIN AFFAIR

...The decision to fire Franklin, while understandable perhaps, was a small-minded one...

...No one has ever discovered who did the shooting or why...

...A few hours later two boys, one the son of a faculty member, were shot and slightly wounded while standing outside FCM headquarters...

...Several previous speakers had urged that the group march to the Computation Center, where a Palo Alto research organization was conducting a project called Gamut-H, which was known to involve plans for carrying out an amphibious invasion, possibly of North Vietnam...

...The American Association of University Professors has not intervened in the case, since Franklin never went through the procedure of filing a formal complaint with their national office...

...The next day President Lyman fired Franklin for having disrupted the Lodge speech and for inciting illegal activity at the Computation Center and violence at the rally of the previous evening...

...It is probable that Lyman's anger over the Lodge incident had not yet cooled when the events of February 10 took place...

...Franklin requested a. hearing before the Faculty Advisory Board, a procedure due him as a tenured faculty member but which had never yet been used at Stanford...

...daily, during which time he would be permitted to gather evidence to be used at the hearing...

...Lyman's statement raises the final question: Can a single individual, no matter how charismatic, really pose such a threat to a major university that $180,000 and thousands of precious man-hours must be spent seeking justification to fire him...

...Franklin is today far more of a campus hero than he could have dreamed of being before the charges were brought, a result which could have been predicted and which will probably pass in time...

...He has been a Communist since he returned in 1966 from a term at Stanford's French campus in Tours...

...It is "difficult but essential," he said, "to distinguish between the protected free expression of ideas . . . and a license to wield any weapon and exploit any opening to attack and bring to a halt the functioning of one of the greatest strongholds of free expression in the world today—the American university...

...President Lyman continues to insist that free speech for Franklin was not the issue here...

...The witnesses clearly knew just what they believed and why...

...In mid-afternoon the police arrived, the demonstrators left the building (having done no major damage), and the police ordered the lawn area cleared, declaring the demonstrators to be an illegal assembly...

...Donald Kennedy, chairman of the biology department (and of the advisory board) and once a leading candidate for the presidency of Harvard...

...They effectively dispelled the myth that Franklin was a campus Svengali who had only to speak and the mob would follow...

...He had also advocated a demonstration that might have ended in the destruction of a $5 million computer...

...As president he tightened up the administration, hired a full-time "prosecutor" to help handle campus disturbances, and called the police on at least three occasions when students "sat-in" and refused to leave a building...

...and David Hamburg, chairman of the department of psychiatry...

...He suggested a "people's war," specifically that students go back and speak to their dormitory mates, play touch football (a tactic that had annoyed the police on earlier occasions), and generally do "whatever, as late into the night as possible...

...In his view, Franklin had not only endangered freedom of speech on the campus but had, at least indirectly, caused two persons to be injured...

...But on the whole, his radical activities on campus have consisted only of occasional speeches...

...Franklin endorsed the proposed demonstration, urged a "strike" at the Computation Center, and ended his speech by saying, "Shut it down...

...Only a few protested, including fifty-five professors who signed a petition urging that Franklin be permitted to teach until his case could be heard...

...We just could not ignore our responsibility to see to it that a standard like this does not exist...

...So he ordered Franklin's discharge and no one was especially surprised...

...When the group arrived at the Computation Center, Franklin remained outside on the lawn while about 150 students milled about inside...

...These acts took place on two separate days during January and February, 1971...

...If this decision is allowed to stand," according to Robert Meyers of ACLU, "it is likely to become the standard of speech in all private universities and even in public universities...

...SRM held a few rallies and teach-ins, briefly invaded the faculty club, and twice occupied the Student Service Center until police were called...

...Franklin believes the future lies with the people of the third world—the Chinese, the North Koreans, the North Vietnamese, and revolutionaries everywhere...

...Most of the witnesses were called by Franklin, who acted as his own counsel...

...But they described an even greater danger when they wrote, "The University thrives on diversity and challenge...

...The next day President Richard Lyman charged Franklin with having led the disruption and ordered him to be tried before a faculty board...

...The situation provided a heavensent opportunity for campus radicals...

...Franklin, thirty-seven, has been an avowed, outspoken Maoist for six years...

...If the police order to leave the grounds of the Computation Center was legal, why were no charges brought against those who were arrested...

...Lyman was clearly outraged by the Lodge incident, which he saw as a clear threat to freedom—a situation in which the mob prevented an individual from exercising his right to speak...

...On the other hand, a court might find that a community of more than 12,000 people, containing stores, schools, and homes, and relying heavily on public funds, cannot legally be considered a "private" institution...

...Richard Lyman, a former history professor who became president in 1970, was reputedly a political liberal who had worked actively for civil rights legislation in California...

...A tenured professor had not been fired from Stanford since 1900, and the hearings had revealed enough ambiguity in the evidence to make the outcome far from assured...

...Posters of Mao and Stalin hung down from the table and during slow periods Franklin occasionally browsed in his little red book of quotations from Chairman Mao...

...He did, however, ask ACLU to represent him in an appeal to the courts, and on March 9 the board of directors of the Northern California affiliate voted unanimously to take the case...

...While he discussed Marx in the classroom, none of his colleagues ever found fault with either his teaching or his scholarship...

...Over the defense table was a large sheet of paper on which someone wrote in the number of Vietnamese casualties each day, as they mounted during the trial...

...The protest reached its peak on January 24, when 800 people attended a rally to hear Franklin speak...

...A central issue before the court will probably be whether or not Stanford, as a private institution, must abide by constitutional limitations in dealing with its employes...

...But protest was not widespread...

...A couple of hundred students held a march around the campus after the decision was announced, and later in the day they established the "Stanford Rehabilitation Movement...

...In a record turnout of 4,700 students, fifty-five per cent voted in favor of his continuing to teach at Stanford...

...In 1967 he helped to harass some recruiters from the CIA who were using the Stanford administration building for recruitment interviews, and in the same year he joined a student sit-in to protest against the campus judicial system (which was changed shortly afterwards...

...The police charged, clubbed, and arrested a few stragglers (no charges were ever brought), and the group agreed to meet again that night...

...This issue aside, the court case could raise some embarrassing questions for Stanford: If Franklin advocated an illegal act when he urged a "strike" at the Computation Center, why were none of the actual participants ever charged with any offense...

...After describing Franklin's hostile view of the University, and pointing out the "high likelihood of future transgressions" on Franklin's part, the report went on, "We are highly dubious whether rehabilitation is a useful concept in this case...

...On January 5, 1972, after studying the evidence for two months, the advisory board agreed unanimously that Franklin should be acquitted of the charge of preventing Lodge from speaking...

...Often they pointed out their own doctrinal disagreements with Franklin...

...Board member Robert Meyers commented after the vote, "As we read [Franklin's] speeches—and under any theory of First Amendment constitutional protections of free speech that the ACLU has ever supported —it was clear to us that this was advocacy, not direct incitement...

...On January 22, he hailed the trustees' ratification of the advisory board's decision as a "landmark...

...Professors Brown and Kennedy, in their minority report, expressed concern that the Franklin decision might set a dangerous precedent, that "less well-buffered institutions may become more vulnerable to outside pressures to get rid of controversial faculty members...

...Immediately after the rally a fight broke out between members of Venceremos, a radical organization to which Franklin belongs, and members of the right wing Free Campus Movement (FCM...

...Rachelle Marshall is a Stanford faculty wife of nineteen years' standing...

...They recommended that Franklin be suspended, while the majority voted to sustain the firing...

...The Stanford administration, several hundred faculty members, forty-five per cent of the students who voted in a campus referendum, and numerous newspaper editors across the country justify Franklin's firing on grounds that he incited illegal acts, including acts of violence, and was a threat to the continued existence of the University...

...Her article, "Christmas in Jail," appeared in the January, 1969, issue...

...When we lose a prominent symbol of these qualities, we lose not only the substance of the challenge but also the external perception that we can take it in stride...

...If, on the night of February 10, Franklin actually incited the violence that took place after his speech, why didn't the University ask that criminal charges be brought against him...

...They agreed unanimously that he was guilty of advocating an illegal action, the demonstration at the Computation Center...

...At the evening rally Franklin spoke in protest against the continued presence of police on the campus and in effect urged that they be kept busy...

...Many of those who watched it unfold see it as an affair that will never quite be duplicated anywhere else—an affair filled with ambiguities to which otherwise impressive men responded with fear rather than courage, and with caution rather than wisdom...

...On January 11, Henry Cabot Lodge was unable to give a scheduled speech on campus because of sustained clapping, shouting, and chanting from the audience...

...Reaction on campus to the decision can probably best be described generally as one of mild surprise, although some cheered and others were outraged...

...Seven months later, on September 28, a seven-man board elected by the faculty began the process which ended in Franklin's discharge...

...If the violent acts that followed his speech bore no relation to the acts that he suggested, can he be said to have incited them...

...Franklin protested loudly to the police lieutenant that the assembly was not illegal, urged other faculty members who were there as observers to remain, and refused to leave...

...In a three-hour opening statement Franklin described at length Stanford's position both as an exploiter of the oppressed within the United States and as an instrument of "imperialist aggression" abroad...

...Franklin, who is known as an outstanding Herman Melville scholar, is the first tenured faculty member to be fired from a major university since the 1950s...

...Franklin denied the charge but insisted at a press conference that he considered disruption too mild a treatment for Lodge, whom he regarded as a war criminal deserving of imprisonment...

...Many of these also signed a "statement of intervention" in Franklin's behalf, which they submitted to the advisory board...

...On January 20, the student government held a referendum on the decision to fire Franklin...

...Meanwhile he was suspended with pay and barred from the campus except for the hours between one and five p.m...

...On February 10, Franklin was the final speaker at a campus rally to protest the invasion...

...But what will not pass from the campus for a long time is the sense that the University responded to a challenge with fear rather than greatness of spirit...

...He, in turn, seemed frequently to be conducting the hearings as if they were a class, held for the benefit of the observers...

...Why were no charges brought against those professors who, in 1969, had advocated a strike on campus after the invasion of Cambodia...

...Before the case could be heard, the invasion of Laos took place...

...Emphasis in the original...

...Whatever the eventual outcome, the Franklin case will go down as one of the sadder episodes in Stanford's history...

...He survived as a minor campus phenomenon under two presidents, J. E. Wallace Sterling and Kenneth Pitzer...

...As one professor commented, "We trembled on the edge of greatness for a time, and lapsed into failure of nerve...

...The hearings, lasting six weeks and involving the testimony of more than a hundred witnesses, took place in a physics lecture hall and were broadcast over the campus radio station...

...On the other charges, defying the police order to disperse and thus endangering others' safety, and inciting to violence, the board split five to two, with Robert McAfee Brown and Donald Kennedy voting to exonerate Franklin...

...The Northern California affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union disagrees, and has decided to represent Franklin in a court appeal...

...There is considerable question, of course, as to whether Franklin even advocated acts that were illegal...

...Stanford lost something of its quality, perhaps forever, when the leadership of the faculty deliberately came to the conclusion that a single thorny individual could endanger the University's existence...

...The name was based on an unfortunate sentence in the advisory board report...

...Wearing fatigue jackets and jeans, or occasionally exotic dress, they paraded to the stand to explain with surprising articulateness Franklin's political position, what his words meant in the speeches cited in the charges, why certain actions were taken, what the "movement" hoped to achieve...

...The decision not only attributes to Franklin powers he never enjoyed, but ignores what may be the real causes of campus problems: two invasions by a President who had promised to end the war, continuation of the draft, and Stanford's close and continuing involvement with the Defense Department while it is inflicting one of the most relentless and vicious bombing attacks in history on the people of Indochina...

...Robert McAfee Brown, a liberal theologian who has written and spoken extensively against the war and recently served a five-day jail term for blocking the entrance to a draft board...

...None of these events attracted more than two or three hundred participants...

...A few days earlier, before a crowd of 550 spectators, forty-seven professors had lined up before an outdoor microphone to deliver short, often bitter, denunciations of the majority decision...

...All of the board members were prominent in their academic fields, and at least four were nationally eminent: Wolfgang Panofsky, director of Stanford's linear accelerator and a Government consultant on arms control...

...The Stanford administration insists that it was his acts, not his beliefs, that were at issue in the decision to fire him...